Is my electricity usage extreme?

Colbaker said:
What sort of electricity monitors are you guys using to give you a real time wattage display?
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Like amigafan said, I've got eon's wireless monitor. It's just an OEM monitor with their branding. npower also offered one iirc. They're like £20 to buy but if you can get it free from your provider then try to.

It's a bit different from a power meter as this measures the electricity for the whole house instead of one appliance.
 
Not that high at all OP tbh.... ours is a tad over double that :O

Just a note about those 'whole house power monitors' . they are not totally accurate on all types of load... they only have a CT and therefore only monitor RMS current, to work out the wattage they take nominal voltage and assume unitity power factor..... this works well for loads which do have unity power factor which are typically the biggest loads in domestic... heating appliances (such as cooker, washing machine, kettle, etc), incandesant lamps etc. However inductive loads (basically motors, old style flouresent fittings, etc) are not reported correctly... and the big one for this forum.... switch mode power supplies (which may be found in new flouresent fittings, chargers/power supplies.... and computers) will also not be reported correctly.

To gave a true reading, it would need a voltage reference and much more complicated firmware
 
Adam_151 said:
Not that high at all OP tbh.... ours is a tad over double that :O

Just a note about those 'whole house power monitors' . they are not totally accurate on all types of load... they only have a CT and therefore only monitor RMS current, to work out the wattage they take nominal voltage and assume unitity power factor..... this works well for loads which do have unity power factor which are typically the biggest loads in domestic... heating appliances (such as cooker, washing machine, kettle, etc), incandesant lamps etc. However inductive loads (basically motors, old style flouresent fittings, etc) are not reported correctly... and the big one for this forum.... switch mode power supplies (which may be found in new flouresent fittings, chargers/power supplies.... and computers) will also not be reported correctly.

To gave a true reading, it would need a voltage reference and much more complicated firmware
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My online account shows 735KWHr used last month (had a meter reading three days ago) and energy monitor shows 719KWHr for the same period so not far off - 2% diff.
 
My own daily average, according to my energy company, is about 11kW/day.

Ideally I want to halve this amount, but that's not very easy with two machines on 24/7. The reason for doing this, is to keep the harddrives on constantly as I firmly believe repetetive spin ups/downs does more harm than good to harddrive.
 
I think the national average is around 2kW, but I'm not sure if that's for 8 hours, 12, or 24. 48kW/hr per household per day seems a bit much. Source is a student who works for national grid, I'm told they use 2kW times number of houses as a first approximation for power consumption.

12 kW/hr per day is roughly what my computer goes through if I leave it running (under load, not idle). A look at google suggests tumble driers are around 4kW/hr per load. Heating your home electrically / electric ovens would go through rather a lot too.

So, 12 seems reasonable to me. Actually, checking the amount I've gone through in the last year, it's just over 12 kW/hr a day on average. 1/3 day time 2/3 night on economy 7.
 
Electric showers add to the cost too, what are they like 8-10kW?
Gas is always cheaper for heating (From what I've seen)


Pedant's Notes - kW/h != kWh

kW/h = kilowatts per hour
kWh = kilowatt hours

National average in the UK is 4800kWh per year which is around 13kWh per day.
 
In 3 months I have used 1322 kWh.
So thats nigh on 15 kWh per day.
Theres just me.

I do however, have 2 beardie vivs, heat by ceramic lamps (On thermostats), they have 2x flourescent tubes in each. a snake with heatmat and stat, and a gecko with same. The heatmats use very little juice compared to heating a 4ft viv to 30 odd degrees!
And I have a laser cutter here, which runs for at least an hour or so per day (draws around 500W in use).

I am an extreme user. According to british gas, the average is 609kWh for my postcode.
 
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